Elizabeth McNie, CSTPR and ENVS graduate student at CU, will give a talk on Friday, April 25, 2008 on "Exploring the Agora: Co-producing useful Climate Science for Policy". The talk will be from 12:00 - 1:00 pm in the CSTPR Conference Room.

The talk is free and open to the public and will be held at the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research's conference room. Click here for directions.

This will be a "brown bag seminar". Feel free to bring your lunches if you wish.

Abstract: Policy-makers from around the world are calling for the production and diffusion of more useful scientific information to inform climate policies. Ideally, useful information expands alternatives and clarifies choices for decision makers. But much of climate science today is grounded in the ‘linear model’ in which information flows from basic research, to applied, and eventually society. Science is curiosity-driven, unfettered by policy demands or the immediate needs of society. Although effective in a wide variety of situations, the linear model falls short in providing useful information for decision makers, over simplifies what is essentially a complex and dynamic relationship, and creates a science-policy gap resulting in knowledge shortcomings for policy makers. Many scholars have suggested new approaches to science policy. Examples include Gibbons et al.’s Mode-2 science and “socially robust” knowledge, Kitcher’s “well-ordered science”, and Stokes’s “use-inspired research”. Together, these authors suggest that science can be pragmatic, policy-relevant, participative, democratic, and that policy-relevant research will not necessarily sacrifice the value of pure basic research.

This paper examines and discusses these propositions in the efforts to co-produce useful climate science for policy in the context of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments (RISA) Program. RISA’s explicit goal is to provide policy-relevant climate information to a variety of decision makers such as water managers, public health officials, fisheries managers, etc., yet each of the eight regional programs functions independently, providing rich fodder for individual case and cross-case comparisons. Additionally, this paper explores the organizational designs, institutions, and practices utilized by the RISAs to co-produce useful climate information and places the knowledge gained from this research in the broader context of science policy research. This talk focuses on the three RISA programs: The Pacific RISA, the Climate Impacts Group and the Climate Assessment of the Southwest.

Biography: Elizabeth McNie is a Ph.D. candidate in Science and Technology Policy Research/Environmental Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She also holds a Master of Arts degree in Psychology-Organization Development from Sonoma State University in California and undergraduate degrees in Marine Transportation and Engineering (minor). Elizabeth’s research interests relate to climate policy and how to facilitate the development of stronger linkages between scientists and policy makers so that scientists produce information that is both needed and used by policy makers in their decision processes. Her research also explores the concept of ‘useful’ scientific information and seeks to develop evaluative tools for determining whether scientific information is useful, and how it is useful, for policy makers. She is also interested in the institutional design, organizational dynamics and social capital needed for successful scientist – policy maker interactions regarding the production of useful information. She is currently conducting research the NOAA Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments programs (RISA) that seek to provide useful short-term climate information for natural resource managers in a variety of contexts and regions of the United States. Elizabeth is also a Fellow in the NSF – Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship Program (IGERT) where she has researched climate change from several disciplinary perspectives including carbon cycle science, policy, business, and the media. Last year Elizabeth was a co-recipient of an NSF grant to conduct paleoclimate research and climate policy research in Iceland as part of an interdisciplinary research team. Other interests include ocean-related policy, interdisciplinary education, and the arctic. Elizabeth is also an active U.S. Merchant Marine Officer and cooks a mean chile.

Elizabeth recently defended her prospectus and is now working full-time on her dissertation titled, "Co-producing useful scientific information for climate policy: Informing science policy and decision support".